The news that Derek Draper, the twice shamed spin-doctor who was part of "Smeargate", has resigned from running LabourList, is to be welcomed. The political blog would almost certainly have died a slow death otherwise. But there are two questions that remain unanswered: have we really learnt the lessons from this mini-controversy, and what is the point of a group-blog trying to rally the troops behind an unpopular government?

To think the McBride/Draper controversy was merely about malicious emails being exchanged between unhinged people is to miss the bigger picture. Political smearing has become prominent because our politics has become more about positioning than a higher public purpose. It has become more about marketing than ideology. More about personalities than policies. It has become an industry in itself more obsessed by the tiny Westminster bubble than the world around them.

The delicious irony has been to watch a Westminster-obsessed class of journalists complain about the very smears they've been publishing and perpetuating for years. Not only that, but they're holding up as a paragon of virtue the one political blogger – Guido Fakwes – who positively revels in smearing political opponents. The very same one who heavily implied that Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten was a paedophile and repeatedly insinuates Gordon Brown is autistic or "insane" without any shred of medical proof. But he's just feeding a political culture that thrives on the stuff.

Even the Guardian and Independent recently succumbed to near identical stories about Harriet Harman – clearly a media hit-job. Newspapers routinely publish co-ordinated smears and then have the audacity to blame New Labour for indulging them. What came first: the chicken or the egg? The corrupt politicians or the hungry-for-smear class of Westminster journalists? New Labour has taken advantage of the environment and taken it further, but they didn't create the conditions.

This isn't a defence of Brown, McBride or Draper – all individuals I hold in contempt. This is to point out the shameless hypocrisy of those acting all sanctimonious now, as Private Eye also illustrated this week.

There's also a huge whiff of hypocrisy around the Conservatives, who have been trying to outdo each other in the outrage stakes. Is the Tory party likely to do anything different once in power? As Peter Oborne recently pointed out in his excellent article on Saturday, Tory MPs are just as likely to be implicated in fiddling their expenses. David Cameron's right-hand man, Andy Coulson, comes from the News of the World, which he was forced to leave after a snooping scandal involving the royals. And let's not forget, this was a leader who said he wanted to eschew the Punch and Judy style of politics – only a few months before he admitted he couldn't follow it through.

That leads me to the second point on whether left-liberals can have real political impact online, and what part LabourList and others can play in that.

It's more that, though.Blogs are an oppositional medium where the headline: "<i>Everything reported as fine, carry on as normal</i>", is unlikely to lead to a jump in traffic. LabourList's editoral problem is that it was conceived as a project to help re-elect new Labour. And yet even its most tribal supporters are having problems getting enthused about this government, for obvious reasons.

In contrast, there is an army of disillusioned leftwing voters who want to vent their anger at this government's betrayal of its founding ideals. That is space I intended to explore with Liberal Conspiracy, which perhaps explains its relative success.

For LabourList's new editor Alex Smith to turn it around, and I wish him all the success, he has to understand the difference between representing the party and representing the grassroots. In other words, it has to become oppositional to the government. I have no doubt that once (if?) David Cameron gets elected then ConservativeHome will become an embarassment and a thorn in its attempt to push the Tories more to the right in the vein of Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, and that Iain Dale will decline in popularity.

Blogs are most successful when they're running an insurgency campaign against the establishment, regardless of political affiliation.